Numlock News: March 24, 2025 • Poisoned Apple, Inescapable Labyrinth, New England

Mar 24, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Poisoned Apple

Snow White made $43 million domestically and $44.3 million abroad, making only $87.3 million and missing expectations of a $100 million global opening. Granted, this kind of Disney movie is pretty much made with the expectation that in a few months, kids with Disney+ subscriptions are going to play it on repeat regardless of the quality. Either way, it’s a weak opening for a piece of Disney IP that could not be more essential to the company’s history and the inception of the animated brand. The accountants have certainly seen value in this era of remaking the classic Disney animated library, with the exercise producing 3 billion-dollar grossers. However, audiences well and truly haven’t — only 3 out of 13 remakes have a higher rotten tomato score than the original, and that’s with recency bias on their side.

Tiana McGee, Reuters and Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Geology

The EarthScope research project put seismometers all over the continental United States and for the first time, covered the areas outside of the earthquake hotspots with great detail. The appeal was to use the data from the seismometers to figure out how earthquakes traveled through different parts of the crust and mantle. Researchers would then use that data to construct our understanding of what parts of the crust are warm, cold, strong, weak, etc. This has been a revelation in places like New England, which was long held to be tectonically boring but is actually very interesting — the crust there is of varying thickness. Some areas contain a thick, 45-kilometer-deep crust stemming from the original eastern North American landmass, while other areas are much thinner and only 25 to 30 kilometers thick. Plus, there’s evidence that parts of the crust and upper mantle slid on top of one another in a very unusual geometry, doubling the boundaries between crust and mantle. This situation — a boiling, complicated, twisted cauldron of intense pressure barely held together by either incredibly thick or thin skin entirely contingent on where you poke with little reason whatsoever — should come as little surprise to anyone who has ever gotten wicked hammered with a New Englander.

Alexandra Witze, Knowable Magazine

Money Laundering

The scamming industry is big in Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia, and centered around cities like Sihanoukville. A crucial lever within this industry is the money laundering element, those who can very quickly take an amount of money wired into a scammer’s account and wash it through a number of accounts spanning a global network of fences. These matchmakers usually get around a 15 percent cut of the scam, lining up the accounts that will filter the stolen funds into the legitimate economy. Telegram channels with over 400,000 users are where the action happens, with local and politically-connected banks often facilitating the transactions.

Selam Gebrekidan and Joy Dong, The New York Times

Labyrinth

Countermeasures against AI scrapers that use overloading systems with traffic designed to purloin content for training have gone mainstream. Following clever anti-scraping strategies like the Nepthnenes software that pushes AI crawlers into neverending mazes of fake content, the big guns are out. Cloudflare has announced AI Labyrinth, a new feature that combats unauthorized AI scraping by feeding back fake AI-generated content and wasting their time, which is big news for a company the scale of Cloudflare. According to the company, AI crawlers generate 50 billion requests to their network of protected sites daily, which accounts for 1 percent of all web traffic they process.

Benj Edwards, Ars Technica

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive remains a pillar of the historical record of the internet, recently gaining prominence due to the change in the U.S. administration and the subsequent deletion or removal of 73,000 web pages. The Internet Archive does all sorts of crucial work in ensuring that the World Wide Web doesn’t collapse out from underneath us due to “link rot,” where citations and links go to web pages that no longer have hosts anymore, depriving us of a crucial element of the historical record. The Archive has a staff of 120 and a budget of just $28 million, and Wikipedia is an example where it really shines, rescuing a daily average of 10,000 dead links on Wikipedia pages and repairing a lifetime record of 23 million rotten links on Wikipedia so far.

Emma Bowman, NPR

Friday

A new study published in JAMA found that patients who got medical procedures right before the weekend tended to suffer more complications than those who got surgery at the beginning of the week. The study analyzed over 450,000 patients receiving one of the 25 most common surgeries from 2007 to 2019 and found that overall, people who had pre-weekend surgeries on Friday (or a Thursday before a long weekend) were 5 percent more likely to experience complications within a year compared to those who got surgery on Mondays (or a Tuesday in the event of a long weekend). This, if anything, means that a diagnosis of “a case of the Mondays” may, in fact, confer significant health benefits, so hey, could be worse.

Dylan Scott, Vox

Monkeys

The island nation of Mauritius has swiftly risen to be the major exporter of research monkeys to the United States, exporting tens of thousands of the animals, bringing about a new and controversial industry to the country and opening new political rifts. For years, China was the world leader in supplying long-tailed macaques, which are crucial for biomedical research. They exported about 30,000 of the animals as recently as 2018. The pandemic shut that down, and Cambodia became the main exporter to the U.S., but scandals around captive-bred versus wild-caught sourcing also shut that down. Now, Mauritius has stepped in, providing 60 percent of U.S. imports. Even so the global total of research macaques imported to the U.S. was down by a third from 2022 to 2023.

Refael Kubersky, Science

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